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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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On April 27, 1934, Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BA from Radcliffe College in 1956. She has lived most of her life in New York City.

In 1964, Valentine's first book Dream Barker was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her recent collections include Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); Lucy (Sarabande, 2009); Little Boat (2007); Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems (2004), which won the National Book Award; The Cradle of the Real Life (2000); Growing Darkness, Growing Light (1997); The River at Wolf (1992); and Home Deep Blue: New and Selected Poems (1989). She is also the editor of The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor (Seneca Review, 2001).

Though her work is frequently identified as having a political subtext, Valentine does not see herself as a "political poet" She explains: "I felt I was more in line with somebody like Elizabeth Bishop, who wouldn't talk about it usually very directly. She wrote a lot that had a political nature, especially after she was in Latin America, but she would never have described herself as a political poet. "Political poet" means to me that there's something present in the work, and in the poet, that isn't in mine or in me."

Valentine has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Bunting Institute. In 2000, she received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She is the recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets

In response to a question about writing and revising, Valentine has said "It seems to me to be a process of looking for something in there, rather than having something and revising it. I don't consider that I really have anything yet--except inchoate mess. As I work on it, I'm always trying to hear the sound of the words, and trying to take out everything that doesn't feel alive. That's my goal: to take out everything that doesn't feel alive. And also to get to a place that has some depth to it. Certainly I'm always working with things that I don't understand--with the unconscious, the invisible. And trying to find a way to translate it."

Valentine taught at New York University until 2004, and in recent years has also taught workshops and seminars at the 92nd St. Y, the University of Pittsburgh, Sarah Lawrence College, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

La Chalupa, the Boat

Jean Valentine, 1934

I am twenty,
drifting in la chalupa,
the blue boat painted with roses,
white lilies—
No, not drifting, I am poling
my way into my life. It seems
like another life:
There were the walls of the mind.
There were the cliffs of the mind,
There were the seven deaths,
and the seven bread-offerings—
Still, there was still
the little boat, the chalupa
you built once, slowly, in the yard, after school—

by this poet

Friend I need your hand every morning
but anger and beauty and hope
these roses make one rose.
Friend I need a hand every evening
but anger and hope and beauty
are three roses
that make one rose.
Let's fix our bed it's in splinters
and I want to stay all year.
Let's fix our bed it's in splinters
and I want to